Visual-Inertial Monocular SLAM with Map Reuse

Understand

In recent years there have been excellent results in Visual-Inertial Odometry techniques, which aim to compute the incremental motion of the sensor with high accuracy and robustness.

• However these approaches lack the capability to close loops, and trajectory estimation accumulates drift even if the sensor is continually revisiting the same place.
• In this work we present a novel tightly-coupled Visual-Inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping system that is able to close loops and reuse its map to achieve zero-drift localization in already mapped areas.
• While our approach can be applied to any camera configuration, we address here the most general problem of a monocular camera, with its well-known scale ambiguity.